Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Upgrade Project => Topic started by: soresu on February 22, 2016, 10:40:22 pm
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Hello all, I have frequented this forum for more than 10 years, but now I have returned to university to do a degree in 3D Animation.
I recently started an X-wing model, but have stalled on it as I realise there must be thousands of variations upon this design.
Wanting a challenge, I would like to do a HTL model for the FS Upgrade project as I have enjoyed the periodic upgrades in visuals that this has brought to the game.
I would appreciate any specific advice for modelling for this engine, and any possible sources of concept art (original or new) for the ships of Freespace 1 and 2.
As the Demon seems to be in dire need of an update this seems like as good a place as any to try.
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:welcome:
As the Demon seems to be in dire need of an update this seems like as good a place as any to try.
The Demon is in my eyes the most outstanding models in need of an upgrade. It's a destroyer-sized vessel however, meaning that it's quite an undertaking. You may want to start off with something a bit smaller, but someone in the FSU team would probably advise you better than I can as to what's in need of an overhaul.
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Well, my opinions on this would be:
- don't be afraid of the polycount. It's a destroyer, so 80k tris are ok
- take into account that you'll have to LoD the model. This I'd especially important during the UV phase
- Design, design design. IMO that's the most immigrant thing in any model. It's easy to fall into the trap of seeing an htl job as a technical exercise. It's not. It's mostly about design. Galemps and Oddgrims htl ships are good examples of that.
- the Demon is a shivan ship. Please don't make it curvy and with lots of curved lines, like some Shiva htl's... See the beauty on those hard edges.
Also, back to that design lecture: Take a good look at the original, and try to identify what are it's signature elements, and keep them on the htl.
Hope that helps :)
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As the Demon seems to be in dire need of an update this seems like as good a place as any to try.
YES PLEASE. It's criminal that there's been no successful upgrade.
If you'd like to get your feet wet with something smaller and less complex, you could try the Azrael. Then take on the Demon once you've figured out a workflow and aesthetic.
- Design, design design. IMO that's the most immigrant thing in any model. It's easy to fall into the trap of seeing an htl job as a technical exercise. It's not. It's mostly about design. Galemps and Oddgrims htl ships are good examples of that.
If you're referring to the Typhon and Colossus, those were RagingLoli's designs. I wish I was as good as Oddgrim.
I will take credit for the Karnak, though. :D
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Oh... I also had the Hades in mind, but I just checked and that was Vasudan Admiral's work. Sorry! *runs*
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Thanks for the responses, glad to finally start to give something back.
1. The LOD part is something I have often heard about in the forum, but still have little comprehension of.
2. As far as UV's go, my main experience with them has been the Auto UV feature in Maya before I sent it to be painted in Mudbox. My forays into true UV unwrapping are pretty limited so far, so whatever I model will likely need help to UV map and fix LODs.
3. My design skills are also pretty limited, as this course is my first foray into art since pre-GCSE 16 years ago. Any source material such as original concepts would be helpful. Lacking that, anything that others might have posted in the forum which could help me construct a model sheet to work from.
4. Would I be right in thinking that triangles are the preferred method for the engine? My modelling lecturer has been preaching quad modelling only, so this has been my go to until now - can I model in quads and convert to tris later?
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1&2. If you're not able to do the unwrapping, then I wouldn't worry about the LOD's. Make a good enough mesh for the Demon or other forlorn model, and likely someone with unwrapping and texturing will likely pick it up, although it might take a while.
3. I'm not sure if there's any concept art for the models that are left, but others would know better than me.
4. You can model in quads. It will be triangulated during the export process. You really don't have to worry about it.
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1. LODs (or Level of Detail) are basically just lower poly models that appear instead of the original model to make rendering the ship easier at long distances. LOD 0 is the model you'd see at its very closest, it should have all that special detail. LOD1 will be a few kilometers out, so you can cut away the real fine detail and smaller objects (maybe 75-60% of the original poly count). LOD 2 and 3 are even farther away that you basically just need the basic shape (50-35% and 25-10% roughly for LODs 2 and 3). Those are just guidelines anyway.
2. I haven't used Mudbox, but basically you want all LODs to share the same texture, and that means making sure that all LODs have their UV maps arranged similarily. That way when you export your textures, you can turn on the mipmapping feature that basically adds LODs to the texture automatically. It's important to try and use as little maps as possible. (Note: It's ok to use separate maps for separate sub-objects (such as turrets), but even then you should still minimize map usage. A good example would be 1 for the mainhull, 1 for the turrets and maybe 1 more for destructible subsystems if they can't fit on the main one)
3. I'll leave that for the other peeps.
4. The conversion process to POF (the file format FS uses) triangulates everything. I personally like working in quads, its so much easier to work with. I'd just make sure that you triangulate certain non-planar quads so you make sure the shading is exactly how you intended it.
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Thanks for the responses, glad to finally start to give something back.
This is how we all got started. :) Glad to have you on board. If you haven't already, start reading up on the FS Modding Portal and make sure you have the tools you need: at a minimum, a VP extractor and POF Constructor Suite 2 (PCS2) with Collada support. You can learn a lot just by poking through a ships.tbl entry and a POF, seeing what information is associated with which and how it's put together.
1. The LOD part is something I have often heard about in the forum, but still have little comprehension of.
LOD stands for Level of Detail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail#A_discrete_LOD_example) and refers to the lower-poly meshes that the engine switches to as distance increases. If you play the game with 'model detail' set very low, you will see a lot of 'popping' as models shift from high-detail when you're close to low-detail as you get farther away. A FreeSpace model needs to include all these models with proper mapping and hierarchy; there's usually four with LOD0 being your primary model, and the rest done after your mesh and mapping are finalized. LOD1 is used in the HUD target view and should be optimized enough to look decent at that size, LOD2 can be the retail mesh, and LOD3 is a very primitive lump for extreme distances. A good rule of thumb is to step down your polycount by an order of magnitude for each stage, e.g. 50,000 poly LOD0, 5,000 poly LOD1, 500 poly LOD2, 50 poly LOD3. Making debris chunks is usually also done while creating LODs.
2. As far as UV's go, my main experience with them has been the Auto UV feature in Maya before I sent it to be painted in Mudbox. My forays into true UV unwrapping are pretty limited so far, so whatever I model will likely need help to UV map and fix LODs.
There's more to UV mapping than I can discuss here, without even venturing into texturing. Everyone has a preferred workflow and we'll be happy to help you as you start getting into it.
3. My design skills are also pretty limited, as this course is my first foray into art since pre-GCSE 16 years ago. Any source material such as original concepts would be helpful. Lacking that, anything that others might have posted in the forum which could help me construct a model sheet to work from.
You've got things backwards. This is a hobby for all of us; if anything, working on FreeSpace models will help to develop your design skills! Be fearless, remember that we started with INFR1 where a tile-mapped stretched-out Osiris the size of a superdestroyer (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/GVSD_Het-ka) was considered acceptable for public release. You'll get great feedback, and anything that has potential someone will be willing to help you finish. It's not unusual for half a dozen people to collaborate on a finished model. (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/GTCa_Warlock) As far as inspiration goes, you're free to browse the Wiki for User-made ships (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/User-made_Ships) and the official concept art. (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Concept_art)
4. Would I be right in thinking that triangles are the preferred method for the engine? My modelling lecturer has been preaching quad modelling only, so this has been my go to until now - can I model in quads and convert to tris later?
Quad modeling might work better depending on your workflow; I prefer using tris but that's because I learned my technique ten years ago when polycounts were much lower and optimization was critical. You can absolutely triangulate before you export, just check that all your nonplanar quads are convex or concave for their surface.
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Personally, I'm not a big fan of trying to use the retail mesh for any LOD. You either have to redo its UV map to the new texture or you have to keep around the old textures just for that model. It's not terribly efficient. If I'm already stepping a model down from LOD0, I find it much easier to just keep stepping down from LOD1. (I literally step down models after I texture them by deleting/simplifying/merging chunks and tweaking the UV as I go.)
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Another Terran design which could use some upgrade is the Argo. Its not too big of a model so there wouldn't be any concern over it being under-detailed.
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Personally...
looks at badges Geez, Mike, you're making ships now too?!
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I started doing a lot since you went on your hiatus...
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I don't recall ever seeing a concept for the Demon.
The reason why your teacher preaches about stocking to quads is because that is indeed the proper modeling way: Most tools are designed to manipulate quads, and quads deform properly when you animate something organic.
In FS, however, since we're modeling non-deformable objects, you can get away with having some tris where needed. But yes, model mainly in quads.
I realize now that we probably gave you a lot of information in one go, and that might be abit overwhelming. So my suggestion would be that for now you just worry about the model (full detail one; LoD0) and the HTL design. And then everything else will follow, sequentially. Fortunately there's a very logical and stepped process to asset creation :)
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This may have a very obvious answer, but what does HTL stand for? I tried searching the forum for the answer once, but so many references came up that it seemed to much trouble to sift for the answer.
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It's a piece of HLP-specific slang. Back in ye olde days, the FS2 engine did not have support for a GPU feature called "Hardware Transform and Lighting", or HTL for short. Because of this, polycounts were severely limited (as the math hidden behind that feature had to be done on the CPU), so when HTL was implemented in FSO, people around here started to refer to hi-poly versions of existing models as "HTL versions".
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Just reading up on an old post from 2010 http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=73507.0 (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=73507.0)
It would be nice to get updated views on the Demon - in case anyones opinions have changed since that topic went dead.
Hades did an outline for the demon that sketched his general take on it, if anyone wants to look at that and chip in, id be happy to take pointers on its design.
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Keep in mind that you'll have to be more liberal when design wise when you're dealing with a destroyer, because the low poly versions had a lot of repetition going on, due to performance limitations.
In the case of the Demon, I guess that the main features would be the frontal traingle, the arch in the back (I wouldn't curve it, I would keep the same silhuette). Then you have a plated top that cradles all the machinery below (more organic looking detail). Oh and of course the neck.
There's a thread somewhere where someone showed off a very cool "head" for the Demon. That kind of surface detail for the plated areas was quite cool.
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My views haven't changed. I really dislike Hades' carving up the grey shell into discrete chunks, and much prefer the sleek armored carapace feel. That's not to say it should be unbroken; see how the MediaVPs Ravana did it.
I'd like to see a physical contrast between the grey areas (thickly armored sheathing) and the black areas (more vulnerable greebling). The high-poly Sathanas, Hatshepsut, and Typhon are excellent references for how to pull this off. It's a way to maintain the distinctive profile and feel evoked by the wide tilemapped areas of the retail model, while also making the most of the enhanced polycounts available. It's a classic technique, just look at the way detail is distributed over the hull of a Star Destroyer. (http://img.lum.dolimg.com/v1/images/databank_superstardestroyer_01_169_d5757b90.jpeg?region=0%2C0%2C1560%2C878&width=768)
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Here's what I was talking about. It's quite kickass IMO, except that it looks too organic and curvy.
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I really wouldn't mind seeing the Demon by way of H. R. Giger (production designer for Ridley Scott's Alien), it seems like an appropriate fit. Have you seen his design for the Batmobile? (http://i10.kanobu.net/r/9636b5faa3602437e35d6b3837358315/1040x-/u.kanobu.ru/editor/images/58/4a94e182-b7e8-4eef-9851-40507299bb3e.jpg) It could easily be a Shivan vehicle.
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Ahhh never seen that one! Giger is awesome.
Yeah Shivan designs lend quite a bit from Giger's work. Although I feel that modelers of Shivan HTL ships have neglected the hard edged elements of Shivan designs (the "monolith" side).
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Interesting thought about Giger influence Galemp. I personally love Alien, and I am aware of his work on the ill fated Jodorowsky Dune too.
I'll look into his designs and confer with some fellow students about possible designs.
Interestingly the third view on the right in that Giger sketch looks strangely similar to the Cain/Lilith design!